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“I never skip leg day.”
“Your skinny thighs would prove otherwise.”
“Hey!” Cody hiked up the hems of his shorts and looked at his legs. “My thighs are quite powerful, thank you very much.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Lucia said. “I brought you along to listen, not ask questions. I want you to listen to what people say and see if anything sounds…”
“Hinky?” Cody offered, using Eileen’s word.
“Yeah. Hinky.” Lucia shook her head. “I actually can’t believe I’m doing this. The sheriff would probably take my badge if he knew about it.”
“I didn’t vote for him,” Cody said.
“That makes two of us.” Lucia pulled up to the curb in front of a house a couple of doors down the block from the Sykes residence on the opposite side of the street. “We’re going to talk with Adrianna Compton. She has some security camera footage from the morning Devin Sykes drowned.”
“Security camera?”
“One of those video doorbells.”
“Got it.” Cody made a face. “There’s no way in hell I’d ever install one of those. I don’t want my comings and goings uploaded to the cloud for everyone to see.”
“Maybe if you stopped going outside in your boxers and showing off your skinny thighs, you might see the benefit. Come on.” Lucia got out of the car and shut the door.
“Son of a… ” After another brief examination of his legs, Cody got out and followed her up the walk of a small, nicely maintained ranch home. He noted the video doorbell setup as Lucia pressed the button, and he stepped slightly to the side to try and stay out of its range.
Moments later, the door opened, and a woman in her mid-twenties smiled at them. “Hi, Deputy Durant.” Her eyes flicked to Cody, returned to Lucia, then moved back to Cody and held his gaze a moment before she looked at Lucia again. “Please, come in.”
“Thank you, Ms. Compton. This is a consultant I’m working with, Cody Bower.”
“Hi,” Cody said, smiling.
Adrianna smiled and blushed a bit, and Cody knew what that meant. Oh, yes. He might be able to charm some extra details out of Adrianna, even if Lucia didn’t want him to talk.
“Ms. Compton, you told the deputy who knocked on your door you thought you had some footage of Mr. Sykes that had been captured on your doorbell video?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Let me get my laptop, and I can show it to you.”
She walked down the hall and entered a room. Lucia turned to Cody and lowered her voice, “You keep your smarmy charm holstered, got it?”
Cody tried his best to look surprised. “Smarmy charm? I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’ve known you a long time, and I know you can lure people in when you want something. You’re like a fucking angler fish, only you dangle something else.”
He made a face. “You’re really mashing up the imagery with this, and it’s making me uncomfortable.”
“Bonus points for me then.”
“What is it you’re blaming me for this time, as I stand here doing nothing, having only said one word since we arrived?”
Before Lucia could reply, Adrianna returned carrying an open laptop in both hands. She walked past them into a long, narrow kitchen where she set the laptop on the countertop. Cody stood behind Lucia and watched over her shoulder as Adrianna accessed a website and entered a username and password to gain entry.
“I don’t normally check the footage,” Adrianna said as she studied the screen. “It’s a lot of random wildlife crossing the yard or people walking by, or the mail person on her route having another argument with her mother over her headphones. But when I saw the sheriff cars over there yesterday, I thought I should take a look.”
“Did you know the Sykes?” Lucia asked.
“No. I waved to them now and then, but I don’t think I ever talked with them.” Adrianna leaned in close to a list of files displayed with dates and timestamps. She ran her finger down the list, then clicked on a specific date. “Here it is, I think. I saved a few snippets from that morning.”
A new window opened and a video started to play. The timestamp in the top right corner read six forty-five a.m. Adrianna’s front door faced east, so the rising sun created a glare across a good portion of the video, but they were able to see a squirrel on the ground near a tree. There was no sound, but they saw a red pickup drive past. In the upper right corner of the screen, he could see the driveway and half of the Sykes house across the street.
